Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Sunday, May 30, 2004

The New York Mets Confrontthe Diseconomies of Scale

As an organization grows arithmetically in number of employees
or functions it has, the diseconomies of scale attack them. As they grow, the diseconomies' symptoms grow at a rate
significantly higher. This is why in truly competitive systems,
small businesses, school classes with small numbers of students,
small government agencies & small military units tend to
outproduce their bigger analogues. One of the key diseconomies is
the increasing centrifugal force that acts against any one person
holding enough knowledge to optimize decisions.

Baseball has some good examples of the challenge of knowledge
management in a complex organization.

Over time, functions tend to get specialised, and cooking up
multi-functional or multi-disciplinary teams (the kind of groups
that tend to produce bigger innovations or important
observations), becomes much harder. Ask the New York Mets.

The Mets are putting so
much stock into pitching coach Rick Peterson's opinion
they are actually having him look at tapes of potential draft
choices.

They actually are? Jeez, what a revolutionary
idea.

It's about time. Peterson was hired during the off-season,
replacing former Tiger & Astro swingman Vern Ruhle. The
inference from the report is that Ruhle wasn't consulted
on potential draft choices.The story doesn't explain, nor do I
know why, Ruhle was uninvolved, whether he was uninterested, or
too busy, or the Mets thought the big club's pitching coach
wouldn't have anything useful to say, or if the Mets just didn't
respect Ruhle's opinion in this area. (If it was a disrespect for
Ruhle's opinion, I suggest the he shouldn't have been the big
club's pitching coach in the first place -- the organization
should have hired someone who could have added a useful
opinion.

It's pretty obvious there's no-one better positioned to
observe micro- and macro trends in major league hitting and
pitching than the big club's pitching coach. He doesn't have to
distribute his attention to the myriad of occupations the manager
does, has half the personalities (just the pitchers and catchers)
to deal with, and is more an observer than a decisionmaker on
in-game decisions. The pitching coach's rôle leaves more energy
to devote to basic observation & applied research.

And, of course, while engaging the pitching coach in scouting
decisions may be new to the Mets organization, it's not unusual
in baseball. The middle 1950s Paul Richards Baltimore Orioles and
their two decades of pitching prospect dominance were built on multi-functional
teams, cross pollination of observations and feedback loops
designed to get the knowledge of what was going on in the big
club's ballparks into a medium that the scouts and minor league
coaching staffs could absorb and make actionable.

ARE YOU BEING DISSERVED?

Beyond baseball, the model the New York Mets just replaced is
the more typical one.

When the whole organization fits into a pair of connected
rooms, (most always) everyone knows everything important that
everyone else knows. It's an extraordinary small organization
that doesn't. As you add people, office space, more specialized
job descriptions, this starts to come apart quaquaversally. The
natural reaction is to throw meetings or memos at it, both of
which, even when they work, attache a ton of overhead to that
which was effortless at a more appropiate scale.

In the practice of knowledge management we try to address
these problems by throwing procedures and sometimes technology at
them, and if the organization is both willing and capable of
being healthy, we can achieve significant gains, though never
(yet) with the magical overhead-less smoothness of the small
organization. One of the things you can always do is cross
pollinate knowledge formally and let everyone know this is
intentional.

If you have problems, consider this recent New York Mets'
initiative, and use it as a pattern:

Pick out your most irritating problems.

Checkmark the ones most amplified by lack of uniform
knowledge across departments or the whole organization.

Build a cross-disciplinary connection between what's
really going on (operational people; in the Mets' case,
the pitching coach), and the strategic or other upstream
departments (in the Mets' case, the scouting/drafting
function).

Give them incentive to succeed.

This approach, if you execute it properly (which is going to
be different in each individual organization), will always
have some returns. It won't solve every
problem, but it will put it in a spot where you can better define
its roots and, therefore, have a better chance to attack it
successfully.

The Mets are in a great position -- with the New York market
to tap into if they succeed they have tons of incentive to be
successful, and they have a poor recent track record. Given that
combination, it's harder for entrenched specialists to stand in
the way of an initiative like this. But even if you have
entrenched opposition, it's time to channel Sal "The
Barber" Maglie or his kinder/gentler descendant Pedro
Martinez, and throw the brush-back pitch, and reclaim home plate.

5/30/2004 04:14:00 PM posted by j @ 5/30/2004 04:14:00 PM

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Kauffman Stadium, Not Wall St.,Shows the True Nature of Markets

The religious fervor for market-anchored analysis has slipped
a little since the beginning of the 2000 stock market hiccup and
the 2001 recession, but while society as a whole has eased off on
this particular faith quite a bit, in managerial circles and in
organizations where finance dominates managerial cognates, lazy
adherence to markets is too common. Baseball illustrates both
where market faith works but also where it causes the knee-jerk
marketeers to implode with as much mess as a Wilbur Wood-sized
jellyfish on Jupiter.

Market-based thinking -- assuming mass-markets
"know" something any individual organism doesn't while
also assuming an individual can get ahead of the market by inside
information or quicker reaction to trends -- can be very useful
in all forms of strategic and operation decision-making. But not
in Las Vegas, it appears, and not when people are trying to gauge
ballpark effects.

FOLLOW THE MONEY TO WISDOM

It is possible as a manager to
follow the money to some essential wisdom. I used market-based
thinking, for example, when I founded the InfoWorld Test Center.
I was installed to do a myriad of things but one of them was to
establish a testing system that would kick the ax of the
better-funded market leader, PC Magazine. PC Mag's Lab
was run by very smart, very educated, very ignorant of real world
computer use guys (I mean guys...I don't think they had
ever had a single female working there when I started the Test
Center). They measured computer execution speeds in 1/100ths of
seconds, sometimes even 1/1000ths of seconds -- and not a set of
operations chained together, but a big process, like repaginating
a 100-page word processing document, and they would intone
portentously that word processing program "A" was
"faster" at 9.17 seconds at this task program
"B" at 9.24.

They had human beings with stopwatches trying their darndest
to time these things. They failed every time -- it was a foolish
model, substituting insignificant digits for thought-out
analysis. The reality is, the market proved that that "Men
With Stopwatches" model could only measure accurately to the
nearest 1/5th of a second. And I knew this because of markets:
The highest-value money application for "Men With
Stopwatches" was thoroughbred horseracing, where very bit of
information that a bettor or bookie can harvest is something
they'll apply to the billion-dollar endeavor. But in horseracing,
human-stopwatch times had a 1/5th second increment...even with
millions riding on a single race, and both bettors and the house
looking for edges, the market knew human accuracy operating a
stopwatch was not 1/1000th of a second or even 1/100th of a
second or even 1/10th of a second, but 1/5th of a second (0.2
seconds).

Clearly, the PC Mag guys knew nothing about horse-racing.
Clearly they knew nothing about end-user computing either,
because perhaps one in five hundred end users would ever care
about .07 seconds lost in re-paginating a 100-page document in
their Wordstar 2000. They had not only gotten the wrong answer,
they'd asked the wrong questions.

In the InfoWorld Test Center case, those of us who worked in
the lab got together and immediately started a research project
to use automatic timing devices (those PC clocks measured in
1/18ths of seconds), aiming to remove the human error factor, and
we started reporting no closer than 15ths of seconds (the human
perception interval).

In that case, the market based approach -- assuming the
largest application of money based on human operation of
stopwatches -- worked. But it's not automatically useful.

FOLLOW THE MONEY TO FOLLY

Baseball Primer cited an
article in the Las Vegas Sun's regular sports gambling
feature about park factors (the way a stadium affects offensive
events), which I've discussed in this weblog before, most
recently here.
Of course, sports bettors and bookies are most interested in park
factors because the way a ballpark promotes or deflates offense
affects the "over/under" line, a bet based on how many
runs a pair of teams will score combined. The bookie picks a sum
and bettors gamble on whether the actual teams' combined scores
will be more or less than the over/under number.

Because gambling is such a big industry in the U.S., I'm
suggesting the biggest market application for park factor
information is Las Vegas sports bookies. On the surface, it
appears the bookies are using a classic business intelligence
approach, gathering data to shape strategy. As story author Jeff
Haney notes

Whenever a new baseball
stadium opens -- this year there are two of them, Petco and
Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park -- bettors scramble to
determine whether it favors pitchers or hitters, overs or
unders.

While Padres fans -- and
even some San Diego players -- have focused on the daunting
411-foot power alley in right-center field at Petco, from a
betting perspective the new park is close to the league
average one-quarter of the way through the season.

In 22 games at Petco, 11
have gone over the posted total; 10 have gone under; and
there was one push. And those totals have not been freakishly
low. The average over/under at Petco so far is 8.09 runs. In
four of the past six games there, the total has been set at 8
1/2 runs, a typical number for the National League.

"It looks like 8 or 8
1/2 will be a pretty good figure for this ballpark,"
White said.

Petco's perception as a
pitchers' park could stem from early-season slumps that
plagued several of the team's high-profile hitters, White
said.

"Some of the big
Padres bats are left-handed," and those players have had
to adjust to Petco's wide-open spaces in right field, White
said. Left fielder Ryan Klesko, for instance, has only one
home run this season, and right fielder Brian Giles managed
only five hits in his first 45 at-bats.

Games at Citizens Bank
Park, meanwhile, are 13-5 in favor of the over, with a couple
of pushes.

In April it was common to
see totals of 7 1/2 in games at Citizens Bank Park. More
recently they have been in the range of 9 to 10 runs, and
White expects those totals to continue rising as a hot,
sticky summer begins to smother South Philadelphia.

"We'll see some more
10 1/2's as soon as the weather gets better there,"
White said.

Sensible enough. But to be efficient, bookies need to find an
effective sum to set as the middle so they can balance their
risk. If they make a habit of setting games set in a park too
high or too low, they make it too easy for a smart bettor to bet
the easy side and the bookie won't have enough margin from the
favored side to make a profit or simply even break even.

And it's clear that most of Las Vegas is flushing its
resources away faster than a retiree pouring quarters into a
one-armed bandit. The article cites some venues where over/unders
are not balanced but out of whack and costing bookies big money:

Snapshot: Baseball
over/unders

Stadiums where
"overs" have ruled in 2004 ...

1. Citizens Bank Park,.13 overs to 5 unders

2. Oriole Park at Camden
Yards, .15 overs to 7 unders

3. Metrodome, .13 overs to 7 unders

4. SBC Park, .13 overs to 8 unders

... and leading
"under" parks so far:

1. Kauffman Stadium,.5 overs to 12 unders

2. SkyDome, .8 overs to 14 unders

3. Wrigley Field, .8 overs to 13 unders

4. Turner Field,.7 overs to 11 unders

The snapshot numbers indicate two common business intelligence
problems: The Citizens' Bank Park Problem and the Kauffman
Stadium Problem.

The Kauffman Stadium Problem I sometimes call the "What
is Past is Prologue" problem, a lazy belief that whatever
.happened in the past is likely to keep on going, and that trends
will continue in the same direction. Kauffman Stadium has been a
blisteringly offensive park for a couple of years. So bookies
seeing games scheduled in that park have overestimated the number
of combined runs for games there 12 times out of 17 games. The
Royals fiddled around with the park's configuration in the
off-season (reported on widely) to reduce the extreme nature of
the offensive boost, so the environment of the park has changed.
Bookies' set points didn't though. Facing the unknown, the
bookies found it easier to do nothing than try to steer their
center point to a new place.

This happens all over baseball (Steve Nelson at Mariners'
Wheelhouse weblog wrote about how this effect undermines
management in building a squad -- back
in late February, he suggested the Mariners would be
disappointing this year because of the Ms' front office's
inability to get beyond their Kauffman Stadium Problem, a
prediction that, so far, looks hauntingly true). It happens
outside baseball as well. I used to work as a journalist at a
weekly newspaper, and we'd get free "analyst" reports.
The analysts hoped we would quote them, making them better-known,
convincing potential buyers of analysis that it was worth a ton
of money to buy their reading of sheeps' entrails. And, of
course, editors liked the reporters to use this slop because it
looked important, and it was cheaper and easier than having to do
independent research. But more often than not, analyst numbers
are laughable. I read one study that took a three-year trend line
of early sales of home computers, and just made a straight line
out of it. By the year 2003, there should have been 3.4 home
computers being used per person in the U.S. Anyone but an analyst
would have figured out the infeasibility of that, but it was eay
to just assume things would stay the same, and no one in the
chain of command bothered to look at the numbers for sense,
because the line looked so...cute.

The Citizens' Bank Park Problem is a little different. It's
solidifying a solution based on a little scattering of early
data. Very early on, that park was favoring pitchers. Whether it
was the weather or the wind or whatever, scores were lower than
they have been more recently in the season. And the bookies have
been setting the line too low.

Las Vegas author and
handicapper Andy Iskoe, who keeps close tabs on baseball
totals, said he likes to wait until later in the season
before reaching a verdict on new stadiums.

"There's always a rush
to be the first to make a conclusion on what kind of biases a
stadium may have," Iskoe said. "Probably,
statistically, you have to wait several seasons to make a
determination.

"But no one wants to
wait several seasons. No one wants to wait even several
weeks. ... But when you're looking at only one-quarter of a
team's home schedule, that's an awfully small database."

While the Phillies have
allowed an average of 4.65 runs per game at home and 3.91
runs on the road, they have scored 5.32 runs per game on the
road, compared with just 5.15 at home.

RUSHING TO GET FLUSHED

The market screams to pay attention, but the data is to scant
to read. As Iskoe notes, in the rush to "know" bookies
and bettors are driven by the market to ineffective decisions.
Bettors probably shouldn't be trying to guess over/under numbers
for new parks most of the time. And when you combine this
Citizens' Park Problem -- deciding on scanty data -- with the
Kauffman Stadium Problem -- finding it hard to change an opinion
once made -- you get instant organizational suicide: Premature
matriculation followed by unyielding adherence to the distortion.

In our culture, the religious fervor for market-based faith
drives people to market-based analyses sometimes without a lot of
close, skeptical questioning. Like a great hitter, sometimes the
market is safe, and sometimes it whiffs. But I've noticed in my
practice that frequently, the more money there is riding on a
decision, the more temptation there is to rush to judgement with
scanty data. It happens in baseball, in Las Vegas, and it may be
happening in your organization.

5/29/2004 09:30:00 PM posted by j @ 5/29/2004 09:30:00 PM

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

The Toronto Blue Jays' Flexible Staffing Blueprint

Baseball has a lot to teach most organizations when it comes
to staffing, division of work, elaborating job descriptions and
breaking up job descriptions and re-designing them to meet
evolving needs.

Most non-baseball organizations are slower and stickier than
pine tar in an Alaskan Winter League when it comes to their
ability to re-align jobs to squeeze more advantage out of the
staff they have. In your own organization, do you ever have a
hard time staffing the most important urgent projects while
finding yourself with excess capacity in flat areas? Well, then
examine the parallel case of baseball's Toronto Blue Jays.

In the off season, they signed eccentric
intellectual, published novelist & poetMiguel
Batista to be their #3 or #2 starting pitcher in a three-year
deal. The team's farm system is loaded with pitchers they believe
will be fine or better in the future, so Batista was seen as a
bridge to get them to the time the minor leaguers could surface.
That plan was based on the Jays' front office's assumption that
their bullpen would be okay this year.

The pen wasn't, struggling so far and leaving the Jays about
9-Â½ games back as of this morning. So maniacal
Toronto beat writer Richard Griffin has come up with a very
insightful flexible staffing idea, based on his assumption
the team is toast this year. Now I don't agree they're toast, but
this is a rebuilding team with lots of young talent that was
strongly considered not in the running for this year but aimed at
the future. A quick start might have put them into contention, at
least psychologically, but this .400 (18-27) Spring makes that
look very unlikely. And in Batista's 10 starts, the team is 4-6,
with his last four starts alternating good and bad.

Griffin's proposal, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Jays
hadn't already thought of it, is later in the season to move
Batista into the bullpen, where he's been used in his career
before, and effectively, and bring up the young arms to take his
starts. Griffin didn't throw any hard data at the thought, but I
will. Here are Batista's consolidated performances as starter and
reliever from 2001-2003, courtesy ESPN, w/the
exception of the RAT column (ratio
of baserunners per 9 innings), which I added:

ERA

W

L

G

IP

RAT

H

R

HR

BB

SO

AVG

As
Starter

3.78

24

22

76

454.1

11.7

429

215

34

164

307

.251

As
Reliever

3.57

5

4

44

63.0

11.3

53

26

4

26

37

.233

Statistically, he's a little better as a reliever, with a
lower RAT () and yielding a lower batting average and a lower
ratio of home runs. Batista is also a class "team guy",
suggesting in the Griffin article he'll gladly do whatever will
help his team. Griffin's suggestion that they prep Batista at the
end of this season and then have him take over the closer's role
next year.

It's hard to swallow because Griffin is one of those snarly
sportswriters who likes to intentionally rile up readers and fans
with hyper-aggresive assertions. It sells papers and scares small
pets. But his position in this case has much virtue; he's seen
something that skilled front offices see and act on all the time,
though bad ones don't. Bad front offices never look under the
label, assuming because when they acquired a player, and they
labeled him a shortstop or a starter or a middle-of-the-lineup
batter, that to shift him to a different role would cost them
"face".

For a weak front office, the label becomes
the player, and the player himself disappears,
objectified, frozen like a fly in amber, rpeserved int he
viewer's perception and dead as a frelling doornail.

In baseball's strong front office's, players are individuals,
taken as they are with all their actual history, potentialities
and ability to change and grow.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Outside of baseball, frankly, almost all management teams are
like the weak baseball front offices. "Flexible
staffing" usually means laying off a third of the workforce
and shipping half of what's left to a Communist China
prison-labor camp. The skill of tweaking job descriptions or
shifting roles based on knowing each staffers' strengths and
experiences, and in response to shifting priorities and
opportunities, is pretty rare among managers outside of baseball.

But the Blue Jays' situtation is a fecund analogy.

If you have contributors who are achievement-oriented, why not
shift them around to take advantage of opportunities? And if you
have "contributors" who are not achievement-oriented,
or managers who won't get beyond job titles or pre-conceived
designs for getting work done well, why are you letting them
plaque up your organization?

5/25/2004 06:08:00 AM posted by j @ 5/25/2004 06:08:00 AM

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Administrivia -- Comments enabled

I'm doing an experiment, enabling comments for the next fortnight.

5/23/2004 10:34:00 AM posted by j @ 5/23/2004 10:34:00 AM

Saturday, May 22, 2004

In almost every organization, there's a powerful need to
perform business intelligence (BI), the gathering and synthesis
of information followed by structured analysis. Organizations
that are good at BI have Mark McGwire home run-sized advantages
in a dozen areas, including marketing analysis to inventory
control to sales-force optimization to quality control.

Of course, that's just the need. The reality is that
most organizations would rather not invest in serious BI; they'd
rather play seat-of-the-pants guesstimation games that
impersonate BI with about as much chance of success as The Rock's
drag impersonation of the Olsen Twins.

Baseball is way ahead of business organizations in this
realm. The least BI-oriented baseball team is way
ahead of the average billion-dollar corporation in BI acumen.
It's become popular in the broader sabermetric community to
ridicule certain teams that reject wholesale adoption of
sabermetric analysis. Deserved or not (I'd say "element
of truth, but overstated"), it's important to note the
lowest common denominator major league team has a wealth of
statistical information and people on staff whose job consists,
to a large degree in analysing data for the purposes of gauging
prospective talent, taking advantage of opponents' weaknesses and
tactical tendencies.

The challenges come in putting the data in context
to create "intelligence", and that requires a human
skill that is not widely available. Beyond baseball, lazy
organizations, faced with a shortage of skilled analysts, will
either pimp the process and buy cheap (usually ineffective)
talent, or pretend it's not worth doing. Baseball is at a bit of
an advantage in this respect, because even though baseball offer
big paydays to BI analysts, there are tons of numerate people
willing to take less money to work in the National Pastime They
Love than they would doing the same jobs for a brake-lining
manufacturer or trash-hauling service.

CONTEXT IS KING

One of the most controversial data sets in the numerate
baseball community is the numbers and techniques analysts use to
analyse "ballpark effects", that is, the way that
specific stadia affect individual performances. It's necessary
for team managers to have some appreciation of it, because a
stadium creates a playing environment that will affect, for
example, whether the long fly ball a left-handed hitter pulls
down the line becomes a long out or a four-bagger. Incrementally,
over a long set of events in the same environment, certain
players will outperform others that in a different environment,
they would lag behind. So baseball managers incorporate a bit of
this knowledge in a decision on who to play in a given day and
how to construct their lineup.

A baseball general manager would use a bit of this information
to assign priorities in judging potential trades (a right-handed
batter who has little batter who hits a ton of homers but not
many doubles in the Cubs' home park will likely amp up
doubles and lose some homers playing the Brewers' home field) and
in thinking about the kinds of tweener players (not first and
second rounders, but still of some interest) a team might draft.

The challenges of most park data is a park affects different
players to different degrees (important non-baseball comparison
later). Right-handed hitters, in general, are affected by a
stadium differently from left-handed ones. Two right-handed
sluggers with the same homer frequency can be affected
differently from each other if one hits mostly line-drives while
the other gets more loft on hits as a rule. And by the time you
chop it up into clearly differentiated slices, most of the sample
sizes will be so small as to be only marginally useful. And there
are a lot of non-talent-related factors: weather patterns that
vary year to year, time of day games start, and other things.

As a result, park factor analysis is pretty controversial.
It's not the idea the parks don't affect results (there is a
small cluster of individuals who argue the contrary. They are the
same MBWT flat-earthers who point to a small number of valid data
points to argue there's no global warming occurring in the face
of a tidal wave of contrary evidence), it's that it's hard to
know exactly why in any given case, and then how to use the
numbers to inform better decisions.

Take this year's Park Factor
data (courtesy of ESPN). I've trimmed a few columns, like
walks (too indirect) and triples (too rare an event to be
meaningful). There are still several things "wrong"
with this table that a numerate person wouldn't have allowed to
seep through, but let's take a quick look at the data because
it's fun to consider.

The way to read the table is to understand the numbers are
"normalized" to 1.000. In the league average stadium,
the numbers would read 1.000 straight across. Lower numbers mean
lower instances. So in Angel Stadium, runs occur at .768 of the
league average (about 77% of the league average, about 23% lower
than average). In Arlington, there are about 42.5% more doubles
than in the average stadium.

Glossary
Park Factor compares the rate of stats at home vs. the
rate of stats on the road.
A rate higher than 1.000 favors the hitter. Below 1.000
favors the pitcher.
PF = ((homeRS + homeRA)/(homeG)) / ((roadRS +
roadRA)/(roadG))
* Teams with home games in multiple stadiums list
aggregate Park Factors.

It's a blast to walk through these numbers, in spite of
manufactured flaws and small sample size. Remember, this season
is about 40 games old for most teams, so that's roughly 20 games
at each stadium, a pretty small pile of numbers that could change
pretty seriously with just two or three upcoming games in a park
going very differently than the few played already.

Some of the interesting data points:

Fenway Park was long an offensive park. After a
redesign of the upper deck some years back, it became a
balanced park that actually favored most pitchers a
little. It took years for the perception to catch up with
the reality. But in the last couple of years, it's
drifted back apparently to being a hitter's park. The
perception, though is still sticking to the previous
offensive-suppression environment.

Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium was an offensive
pressure-cooker the last couple of years, last year
especially. The team made what they planned to be small
tweaks to tone it down a little, but this year so far,
it's playing as the most run-suppressing stadium in the
majors.

Houston's Enron Field, thought of as an offensive
bandbox, is also so far this year playing as a
pitcher-friendly place, if the numbers hold water. I
wonder if this means Enron's stock price is a good
value...perhaps not.

The San Francisco Giants' stadium, since its
recent construction has been an extreme
pitchers' park (well, for everyone but one guy, but he's
just "seven sigma") and this year has been
pretty marked in the other direction and in all the
categories. Perhaps it's because this year they sold the
naming rights to the park to Seattle's Best Coffee and
the pitchers are getting free macchiatos between innings.

SOME CRITICISM -- MAKING THESE NUMBERS
BETTER

When you look at numbers, you should always be suspicious when
you get certain artifacts that tell you the person putting the
data together doesn't really have a knack for analysis. There are
some indicators here that make me suspicious.

There are insignificant numbers in the charts. In the
example I used before, Angel Stadium's run factor, the
table runs the number .768. The trailing 8 is
insigificant and the thousandths (third decimla place) in
every one of the numbers ought to be gone, with some
rounding scheme applied so they all appear as two digits.
When people throw insignificant digits at you, especially
in data allegedly being presented to inform, its one of
three things: they're trying to hide a number or two in
the pile by making the set harder to read; they're
ignorant of the significance of the numbers they're
showing you (not just statistically, but ignorant in
every respect); they know better but they're lazy. But
the whole chart would be a better analysis if the maker
had rounded down to two digits.

There's a line for Olympic Stadium/Bithorn I put in
italics because these numbers already, as I mentioned,
suffer from small sample size, but Les Expos Pauvres
have to play in two different home stadia, and mingling
the two very dissimilar stadia together removes every
value but one from the line (trying to judge how
individual Expo players' accumulated stats miught be
affected by being an Expo and playing in those home
stadia). That line really shouldn't appear, even with
triple the data it's not going to be meaningful.

The inclusion of a pair of games played in Tokyo in the
data set. I let the asterisked Tropicana Field/Tokyo pair
through because the Devil Rays played but two home games
there this year. But really, the Rays and the Yankees'
data for those games just should appear anywhere in the
data set because it affects each of those teams' apparent
performance and affects the league averages by being
dumped in there (when no other teams will be playing home
or road games there).

BEYOND BASEBALL

Beyond baseball, you can use BI to increase the chances for
future performance imporvement, but you need to use real analysts
(these should be either professionally trained or even just
people with very good skills, but not merely cheap leftovers you
scrape up off the sidewalk like no-hit good-glove utility
infielders).

Look at numbers, analyse numbers, but remember that context is
everything. And, don't forget the numbers may only be as good as
the analysis theat wen into them...as Mark Twain also said: Figures
dont lie, but liars can figure.

5/22/2004 03:32:00 PM posted by j @ 5/22/2004 03:32:00 PM

Thursday, May 20, 2004

Early baseball is a great lens through which to view the
process of innovation. Because baseball is open and recorded, and
combined with a tradition of story-telling and archival history,
it's a fantastic lens through which to see, and learn, conscious
evolution (what I call prevolution).

Prevolution differs from evolution because it's pre-meditated,
studied, intentional, while evolution
in nature is random and without forethought, apparently
functioning because it's accidental. Sometimes research
scientists and design pros and expensive consultants come up with
the most valuable tools, but frequently, the best inventors are
right under your nose -- your own staff. Being immersed in the
process can make them blind to the subtle observations required
to innovate, or it might give them the necessary platform from
which to innovate through experimentation.

Early baseball was one experiment after another -- differing
numbers of balls and strikes, official balls that were juiced and
deadened (well, recent baseball shares that one), equipment made
out of rapidly-prevolving materials in mutating shapes and
configurations. As with most experimentation, most of the ideas
didn't work. Some were downright failures, and I don't mean Mickey
Brantley type failures, but more like 1899
Cleveland Spiders failures.

The most consistently putrid artifact, though, were the
burnt-toast gloves fielders used. Once fielders' gloves became
the norm (early baseballists, like cricketers past and present,
went bare-handed, the last noteworthy hold-out being the
legendary Bid
McPhee) they held on to their basic configuration for about
three decades, emulating what we think of today as non-baseball
gloves, with unconnected fingers, flat surfaces without a pocket,
uniform material thickness everywhere. Market theory fails to
explain why they were stuck in this configuration. Players wanted
better mousetraps and there was money in providing them with
better mousetraps. Sporting goods manufacturers were constrained,
it appears, by the word "glove".

The Einstein who shattered the paradigm was not a scientist
nor a leather-worker nor an industrial designer nor a sporting
goods magnate. It was Spittin'
Bill Doak, a polymathic pitcher of the Teens and Twenties. As
a player, he had specific ideas about what was needed, including
a more convex shape (like a slightly cupped hand) and a
pocket with webbing. According to Rawlings:

In 1920, Bill Doak, a
journeyman pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, approached
Rawlings with an idea for improving the baseball glove from a
mere protective device to a genuine aid in fielding. The
"Bill Doak" model was so revolutionary that it
stayed in Rawlings' line until 1953. Its key feature was a
multi-thong web laced into the first finger and thumb, which
created for the first time in baseball's young life, a
natural pocket.

According to SABR member and Doak biographer Steve Steinberg,
the glove was the foundation of Rawlings' glove design for about
30 years, and that Doak made up to $25,000 a year in royalties
from it (which would have clearly exceeded his feudal-ownership
era baseball salary).

According to Steinberg, Doak was also responsible for other
innovations, including a campaign that made an important
alteration in the trajectory of the rules. In 1920, the leagues
were interested in boosting offense, and decided to ban trick
pitches and deliveries; they came up with a plan to ban the
spitball, but many pitchers like Doak relied totally on (a) the
effect of their spitball, and (b) the disconcerting effect that
throwing a pitch that might be a spitball had on batters
(spitballers would frequently pretend to load up the ball even on
a pitch that wasn't going to be a spitter, just to mess with the
batter's mind). Doak campaigned to have all active spitballers
"register" and be grandfathered by name in the rule,
which allowed the select group to continue throwing the banned
pitch through their careers. It didn't help Doak very much much,
but guys like Jack
"The Mighty Eskimo" Quinn thrived. Quinn loaded
phlegm onto horsehide effectively in the majors until he was 48
years old.

If the the history of the spitball intrigues you, Steinberg's
own site has a lovely, informative and entertaining section on it
here.

BEYOND BASEBALL

If you're not enlisting your own staff to gen up ideas,
innovate process designs, experiment with tools (conceptual and
physical), you're missing out on the kind of magic Spittin' Bill
Doak created. They are immersed in the quotidian actions. They
know things you (and all the outsiders) don't. That doesn't mean
all their ideas will be useful (in fact, most won't). But some of
the best and easiest ideas to implement are sitting in staffers'
heads, waiting to happen.

Joe Ely's writing about Lean Manufacturing Systems (I'm not
going to explain it here, read his stuff; Joe is smart, knows
what he doesn't know, and has the perfect attitude about
learning, meaning he's exceptionally observant and therefore,
useful to read) is filled with examples of prevolution and
innovation. My favorite one, and a great example of Toyota
encouraging line staff to innovate aggressively, is here.

It doesn't matter if you're managing outside of manufacturing.
The example holds perfectly by analogy. The tools in Ely's case
are physical, but paper forms are tools, work processes are
tools, the way you connect processes together are tools. The
examples are powerful regardless of what your organization does.

If you're not recruiting and mining and rewarding the
prevolutionary ideas of your line staff, you're unnecessarily
limiting your success, like standing out in the field with a
piece of burnt toast on your hand, when you could instead have a
useful innovation, like a Bill Doak model glove with webbing and
a pocket.

5/20/2004 07:29:00 AM posted by j @ 5/20/2004 07:29:00 AM

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

The Yanks' Management By Wishful Thinking:When 2nd Place Is Cherry-Pie Time

I've written about Management by Wishful Thinking (MBWT)
before, even recently.
I've never explicitly stated it, but MBWT is usually the stomping
grounds of intellectually lazy or -challenged organizations (for
example, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays), the
resource-constrained-so-they-don't-have-many-alternatives
organizations (for example, the Montreal/San Juan Expos), and
the
resource-ultra-rich-but-still-trying-to-figure-out-how-to-squeeze-more-juice-out
(for example, the Seattle Mariners).

But according
to Stephen Goldman (my favorite regular columnist who covers
a single team), the Yankees off-season was powered by MBWT, a
very specific kind. It's hard, on the surface, to criticize the
Yanks' pre-season plan: they replaced a fine, if overrated, Andy
Pettitte and aging, the-said-he-wanted-to-retire Roger Clemens
with the two best available pitchers. Kevin
Brown, (second best hurler in the Majors) and Javier
Vazquez (merely excellent, though not featuring a long track record).
They acquired the best player in baseball whose first name isn't
Barry (more on A-Rod
in a sec, because he's part of the issue).

On the surface, it's hard to believe they could have had MBWT
-- after all, they fit none of the aforementioned categories of
organizations most subject to the disorder. They have tons of
resources and tons of willingness to spend those resources,
combined with a smart front office. Moreover, they are in 1st
place in their division this morning at 22-15, projecting out to
a 97-win season. It's not time for second-line dancing in Gotham.

PYTHAGORAS & THE GEOMETRY OF
INFINITE DOOM

But there are subtle indications the team is not as
good as Yankee fans had believed. Their Pythagorean winning
percentage (a formula introduced by Bill James that projects what
a team should winprobabilisticallyy based on the number of runs
they score and the number they allow) is only
.514 this morning, which is more like 19-18, which would put
them in 3rd place, 3 games behind Boston and chasing Baltimore.
Now Pythagorean projections are just soft indicators in
themselves -- it's one of those stats that works beautifully in
the general, consolidated case, but has hordes of exceptions in
the individual cases -- but it's a strong (though not absolute)
indication of future success. This is believed to be because luck
tends to balance out and that if you're significantly
overperforming or significantly underperforming your Pythagorean
won-lost record, the next set of events is likely to draw you
towards your Pythagorean. So since the Yanks are in 1st place,
it's partially because of luck, and because luck tends to even
out in the end, the Yanks are "due" to regress to their
Pythagorean winning percentage.

WHY STAR WARS MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEMS
FAIL MORE OFTEN THAN NOT

The biggest single reason, I believe, the Yanks got in this
position was their focus on, & success in, signing Alex
Rodriguez. They already had a very potent team and added the
pitching. But the lure of The Single Big Solution is a
lure in baseball and outside of it as well. Intellectually lazy
management will try to attack problems or shortcomings with a
single great solution, a coup de grace. It's
simple...you attack one thing persistently. In simple systems, it
works pretty well. In this case, the Yanks signed the best
offensive player in the American League, and he's more than
adequate at his key defensive position (though he's not playing
it at the moment, but that's a different issue).

But A-Rod has been like the hundred-billion dollar investment
over the last twenty years that Republican and Democratic
administrations have poured into the Star Wars Missile Defense
System - flushed down the toilet to no resulting gain. While we
were pouring a vast percentage of our wealth and military
research into a The Single Big Solution, our enemies have
innovated a gaggle of low-cost ways of killing The Single Big
Solution can't and won't address.

It happens in business as well as military organizations. A marketing department falls in love with a specific kind of promotion and beats it to death by seeing it as the only thing they need to do. Auto-makers see demand for urban assault vehicles and other lard-ass cars, and make new offerings bigger every year as the solution to their doldrums when the gasoline demand the trend fuels creates upward price pressure on gasoline, constraining their initiative's success.

While the Yanks brought in A-Rod as The Single Big Solution
(the piece that would put them over the top), the team was basing
it's assumed success in other areas on MBWT. Here's Goldman's
list of MBWT items the Yanks started the season with:

Going into this season, the
Yankees made a number of wagers:

We can throw together a starting rotation.

Jose Contreras is a major league starter.

We can get by with no outfield depth.

None of our old players will act their ages.

No one will get hurt.

We can buy a better bullpen.

We can do without second-line depth of any kind.

Enrique Wilson is an everyday player.

Jason Giambi can play first every day.

A DH rotation involving Bernie Williams and Kenny
Lofton will be more about "hitter" than
"designated."

As has been reported
virtually everywhere except Freshwater Fisherman's
Quarterly, the leadership spent a lot of money backing
up these wagers. The results have been mixed.

The key bet was the one
about second-line depth, because it meant that the Yankees
have very little in the way of Plan B at any position. Last
year's performance showed that Contreras was a weak gamble at
best. Donovan Osborne, the latest in a long line of failed
Joe Torre Cardinals retreads, was an extreme long shot. Even
when healthy, Jorge DePaula did not scream Walter Johnson to
anybody. On offense, Ruben Sierra's comeback has been a
stroke of pure luck, not genius, and it remains to see if it
will last. Wilson was just a dream. Miguel Cairo may continue
to .802 OPS in a Mariano Duncan '96 sort of way, but it's
extremely doubtful.

Of course, the
team's lack of alternatives could not have been solved in
just one winter. It's a problem that has been building for
years, and it's only going to get worse. The only escape is
to get the farm system out of mothballs and start running a
productive draft (which won't happen this year regardless,
because the talent is supposedly quite thin). It is cheaper,
in the long run, to buy 10 college pitchers for the price of
one Jose Contreras and school them yourself rather than
having to guess how a middle-aged pitcher is going to perform
once he escapes from despotism. (emphasis mine)

Goldman rightly points out that the problems are not from this
off-season's moves, but collected over time and improbable to
solve in one off-season, especially by a team that went to the
World Series (success makes change more difficult for an
organization).

The Yanks have done the improbable, though. They have made
MBWT by an intelligent, resource-rich organization something that
seems possible to me. Do you have any other
examples of it?

5/18/2004 09:04:00 AM posted by j @ 5/18/2004 09:04:00 AM

Sunday, May 16, 2004

When What is Past is Prologue.And the Book & the Epilogue, Too.

An interesting interview in today's New York Daily News
(courtesy of Baseball
Primer) is a clear indication of why Major League Baseball
has such a persistently difficult time evolving without making a
mess of it. The (clearly) well-intentioned man at the top,
commissioner Bud Selig, is firmly attached to the past. That's
not a bad thing in itself, especially in an
"institution" like baseball that has megatons of
emotional investment in its fans nostalgic memories and
traditions. It's a weakness in a manager or executive when that
attachment to the rear-view mirror unbalances the necessary focus
on the future and the present's shaping of the future.

For the dozen years Selig has been acting as commissioner,
I've had a lot of concern for his "leadership". It was
not until I read today's interview that it became clear to me the
precise pattern that has made his tenure so gratuitously rocky.
Selig's good intentions are constrained by his lusty passion for
the past paired with a lack of aptitude for understanding the
present and how that present affects the future.

LEADERSHIP: BALDERDASH OR PAP?

I almost never talk about "leadership" because it's
mostly vaporous hogwash, sometimes sweet-smelling, sometimes
sulfurous. With only one exception I can think of, people who
write about or research "leadership" are puffing up
something that's neither measurable, definable, nor actionable
(that is, whatever "leadership" as defined is, an
intelligent person can't re-create a pattern and follow it to get
success).

I'm not confident "leadership" exists outside of
fire/rescue and military environments where the manager may be
required to make decisions about his employees' life and death
and the employees are required on request to commit to actions
that may be their last. If it exists at all, it is the
combination of inductive reasoning to recognize future
possibilities with reasonable accuracy and to have high enough
"emotional intelligence" and communication skill to
inspire reports to follow an actionable vision based around those
possibilities.

EYES GLUED TO THE REAR-VIEW

It's clear from the interview that Mr. Selig loves the past
and doesn't have a sophisticated view of the future. For example:

Q: What's the
last movie you saw?

A: I just
never get to go to the movies. I'll sit at home, by the way,
watching movies. Old movies. My favorites? Gone With the
Wind, Casablanca. Pride of the Yankees - I can watch
"The Natural" over and over.

He's not steeping himself in popular culture, a necessity in
an endeavor that is, at its core, an entertainment that sells
itself to an evolving population. The past is comforting to him.
I can watch The Natural over and over myself, but not to
the exclusion of important ethnographic work about today's teens
and young-twenty-somethings such as Dude, Where's My Car
& Matrix,
Reloaded. Selig, I think, recognizes things are changing and
need to, he doesn't try to freeze the game in the past, he's open
to change, he just has a tin ear for what that change should be.
His changes, because they are out of context with the environment
(you get something caught in your throat and cough violently, he
says "god bless you"), grate on people and can even
create controversy he didn't foresee or even understand as likely
because his ear is tin.

Q: Were you
surprised at the reaction to the Spider-Man promotion?

A: Yeah, I
guess I was. Just remember at Ebbets field when you hit the
old Abe Stark clothier sign, you got a free suit. You had the
Chesterfield sign in the Polo Grounds emitting smoke. People
can say, "But it's different on the bases." Well,
No. 1, (the ads) are very small. No. 2, we had ribbons on
them Mother's Day to fight breast cancer, and we're going to
have blue ribbons on Father's Day for prostate cancer. There
are some people who are going to resist every change, no
matter what.

But the single thing I have always used as the milestone of
MLB's executive lack was the 2002 All-Star Game. As you probably
remember, it went extra innings and ended in a tie because there
was no contingency plan for an extra-inning game. When one of the
teams ran out of pitchers, execs held a hasty meeting and decided
to call the game. A frightful, unforgivable managerial
performance, not because I think there's anything sacred about
the All-Star game (if there ever was, there certainly hasn't been
since 1957, and if there's a venue for pure tacky
experimentation, it's got to be this flextravaganza), but because
they didn't have a plan already in place for a contingency that
is so probable. A little over 8% of games go into extra innings,
a little more frequently than one game in 13, with that
probability meaning about one game per day during the season.

¿TEN INNINGS? SO WHAT?

Every individual team in the majors has grounds rules for how
long a game can continue as a tie and what happens when the game
reaches that trigger point. All 30 team front offices have that
nailed. The rule book has specifics of how to handle a regular
season game that extends beyond the time the teams can continue
to play for whatever reason. Every workgroup of umpires in both
leagues have that down.

The commissioner's office didn't think of it in advance.

Q: In 2002 you
had the All-Star game in your home town, in the new stadium
you pushed to build. Then it ended in a tie and you were
ridiculed. What was that like for you?

A: It hurt
a lot. That was one of the most uncomfortable nights and days
afterwards. It was really heartbreaking. I thought quickly of
my options - there were no options.

That's the essence of it right there. This well-meaning,
perfectly-intelligent man thought quickly of his options which he
shouldn't have been thinking about in that moment because he
should have had a contingency plan in place for such an
eventuality years previously so if it ever came up, it wouldn't
have required quick thinking. We're talking about planning for an
occurrencee that happens about 200 times during a regular season.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Selig, sadly, is not extraordinary, just more exposed because
baseball is televised and very public. In non-baseball
organizations, you see this all the time, especially in the
corporate world. It's amazing to me how many $250 million or
bigger companies have a man, or (rarely) a woman, at the helm who
believes what is past is not only prologue, but the whole book
and the epilogue as well. With a manager who knows they have a
tin ear and behaves accordingly (delegates this to someone good
who does have the aptitude and the power to make things happen),
a head person can finesse their disability. But too frequently,
the man with his eyes glued to the rear-view mirror does what
most of us do -- value the things we do well, and tend to
undervalue what we don't.

Yes, the past is important, more important in an endeavor like
baseball. But understanding the present, its reality and
trajectory, blended with the knowledge of moments and
trajectories in the past, is the foundation for planning for
change, for the future. If you don't have that aptitude, and Mr.
Selig doesn't seem to have even the smallest soupÃ§on of it, you
can't manage change.

And if like Selig, and like an overwhelming number of managers
and executives, you don't have that ability, you should
absolutely not be the woman or man at the very top of an
organization.

5/16/2004 10:44:00 AM posted by j @ 5/16/2004 10:44:00 AM

Thursday, May 13, 2004

Follow-Up: Change, Problem-Solvingand the Long Parade of Bums

I got an unusual amount of mail on yesterday's post making
assertions the authors thought were in opposition to what I had
said. Almost all of them were in agreement with my direction.

This means I wasn't clear enough in the entry. Here's the
essence of what I was trying to get at.

1) The Dodgers used 42 different players as their main 3rd
baseman over 73 seasons: used-up vets, mediocre young guys,
never-was utility guys, guys being played temporarily out of
position, guys they wanted on the team but didn't know where to
put. Then after a successful ten-year stint with a home-brewed
prospect who was a solid, legit solution, they immediately
regressed, throwing 12 different main third basefolk at the
position over the next 15 seasons.

2) Problem-solving has certain costs associated with it,
especially if you have limited resources, so you want to invest
your problem-solving resources generally in dealing with
solutions that will have the highest impact. Not finding at least
a Jersey Jor Stripp or a Billy Cox, mediocre-but-adequate guys
you could throw at the spot and leave there for 5+ years
chronically used up decision-making resources that could have
been better invested that they were in finding the next stop-gap.

3) That gratuitous churn exposed a weakness in organizational
perception.

I want to restate one thing I said in the entry...that is, I'm
not opposed to change. If the Dodgers had brought up good young
players, used them for a year or two, and let them go free agent
or trade them for other value, I wouldn't argue it was a trail of
tears as I did. Yes, there is a cost in churn, but it's possible
the benefit/cost of changing every year could be positive if
the player you were throwing out there every year was average or
better, that is, you were prevolving consciously,
planning for success, succeeding, planning for your next success,
succeeding, and so on.

The Dodgers in no way did this. They were just flailing,
throwing one body after another at the position in the hopes that
a better solution would come along later or having hopes
(sometimes justified, more frequently not) that a solution was at
hand and then crashing with it.

The mean offensive performance at the position was below
average for the first 73 years, and the mean defensive
performance appears to be below-average, too. (Defensive stats
can be misleading, but indicative). The Dodgers were not a stupid
organization at all, just suffering from a blind spot at this
position that prevented them for investing enough concern to fix
it or from seeing what they needed to see in this isolated area.

A total lack of change (trying a guy, having him be
sub-mediocre, riding him to a long & pointlessJim
"Termites" Presley-like or Ed
Sprague-like career while pretending he's good, is just as
bad if the stasis is done out of laziness, lack of concern or
wishful thinking.

It wasn't that they shouldn't have tried changes, they should
have invested enough in the process to acquire a third baseman
who would be adequate or better for a while. They didn't.

5/13/2004 06:04:00 PM posted by j @ 5/13/2004 06:04:00 PM

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

In my last real entry I talked about chronic supply-side
staffing problems. There's little most organizations can do about
that since the killer factors are usually cultural (example: most
senior nurses have as many valuable skills as senior physicians,
but get paid less; if you wanted to address the nurse shortage by
paying what the skills were actually worth, you'd have to
internalise those costs and that would make it harder to
compete).

The demand side is something you can address if you're
willing to face your organization's limitations squarely and
aggressively. Most organizations have hiring blind spots, and
since hiring decisions are by far the most important category of
decision you'll make, shortcomings here are the worst, sometimes
even fatal.

There are a bunch of hiring blind spots. If an organization
has an H.R. department, they start getting constrained by
standards, which are usually designed not to get the best
candidate, but to avoid hiring the worst. If they don't have a
dedicated or empowered H.R. group and they're doing it seat of
the pants, they tend to miss opportunities such as auditions,
simulations of the actual kind of work a hire will do. And seat
of the pants hiring managers tend to be in a hurry, rushing the
process for what seem to be good reasons, but rushing can lead
someone to overlook the right candidate or not investgate fully
any of them.

There's another blind spot, harder to explain or to fix. Most
organizations have constellations of unexamined behaviors that
together, when they have a chance to hire for a certain position,
lead them to either make the same hiring mistake over and over
again, or to make a crazy, reactive pinball path through every
mistake you can make. Baseball organizations are notorious for
this and they make great examples.

AN EXALTATION OF BUMS

The Brooklyn and then Los Angeles Dodgers had a 73-year
history of disability in the hiring of effective third basemen.
If you know a lot about early baseball history, skip the rest of
this paragraph. In the 19th century and very early 20th century,
there were times when the ball was very dead and there was a lot
of bunting even when the ball was lively, because the league
would juice the ball once seasons and then deflate its resiliency
another as a way of managing player salaries and fan interest. A
lot of balls stayed in the infield, and bunting or pulling the
ball down the third base line was a reasonable strategy because
the third baseman, of all the infielders, has on the average the
longest throw to first. So fielding was relatively important for
third basefolk, especially compared to now. And as a manager,
that meant you would be willing to give up a little offense to
get that defense (the way it was with shortstops in the 70s and
80s and until the advent of the Alex Rodriguez / Derek Jeter
/Nomar Garciaparra models whose hitting seems to justify their
lesser defense).

So for much of baseball history, the "talent" pool
of third basemen tended to be a toxic waste dump with a few gems
floating on top. The Dodgers seemed to have decided early on to
resign themselves to that, and rather than rage against the
situation, to just accept it. Their roster of third basemen from
1900 to 1972 is a trail of tears, a long parade to the graveyard,
a bad 1950s teen death song. In those 73 seasons, 42 different
players were the Bums' main third sacker for a year. By
"main", I mean the person who played the most games at
that position for the team that year.

With two exceptions, the mediocre but beloved by fans Jersey
Joe Stripp (1932-37, sort of a Joey Cora of his time) and the
mediocre but beloved by fans Billy Cox (1948-53), no player was
the main third baseman for the Dodgers for five or more years.
Remarkably, there were 27 players who were the team's main third
baseman for just one year. Here's the breakdown.

Main Dodger
3rd Baseman
for
Years

# of
Players

1

27

2

8

3

3

4

2

5

1

6

2

Ugly, because there are so many decisions that end up being
just short-term ones, and, as you'll see later, just about none
of them rendered good results. Change is not a bad thing, but
overall, you don't want to make extra decisions if you can avoid
them. Having an acceptable player sit in a position for six
years, like a Stripp or a Cox, leaves you problem-solving
resources to attack big problems. There will always be big
problems and always be a limited amount of research resources to
throw at them, so churning mediocrities bleeds off resources that
could yield higher returns if aimed elsewhere.

But Dodger Demand Side Staffing Challenge #1 was conscious.
The organization, like many others, didn't value the position
very highly, so tended to make decisions as though the outcomes
wouldn't matter much, so tended to end up with players who
wouldn't matter much.

Dodger Demand Side Staffing Challenge #2 was a limitation. The
Dodgers didn't tend to acquire strong 3rd basemen when
incoming players, pre-farm system, were a free-for-all. And once
there was a farm system, they didn't tend to produce 3rd
basemen from their minor leagues.

The table below lists the main Dodger third basemen from 1900
through 1972. I show it because you can see the different kinds
of decisions the Dodgers thought they were making to
stabilize the position. RPRO is my
own offensive index, where 100 is the league average; Apps is approximate plate appearances, Roba is the batter's on-base percentage as
a ratio of the leagues that year (higher is better), and Rslg is the batter's slugging percentage
as a ratio of the leagues that year (higher is better).

Year

First

LastName

Apps

RPRO

Roba

RSlg

1900

LAVE

CROSS

486

101

100

102

1901

CHARLIE

IRWIN

256

83

87

81

1902

CHARLIE

IRWIN

497

107

113

99

1903

SAMMY

STRANG

583

106

116

95

1904

MIKE

McCORMICK

390

81

93

68

1905

EMIL

BATCH

594

98

92

106

1906

DOC

CASEY

623

97

101

93

1907

DOC

CASEY

561

91

94

90

1908

TOMMY

SHEEHAN

521

94

103

85

1909

ED

LENNOX

482

111

111

114

1910

ED

LENNOX

403

103

103

105

1911

EDDIE

ZIMMERMAN

451

75

76

74

1912

RED

SMITH

540

107

108

106

1913

RED

SMITH

585

117

112

124

1914

RED

SMITH

360

103

100

107

1915

GUS

GETZ

485

92

91

94

1916

MIKE

MOWREY

545

102

108

95

1917

MIKE

MOWREY

300

92

98

86

1918

OLLIE

O'MARA

457

76

79

73

1919

LEW

MALONE

168

81

78

84

1920

JIMMY

JOHNSTON

678

103

106

101

1921

JIMMY

JOHNSTON

669

112

111

115

1922

ANDY

HIGH

638

100

102

97

1923

ANDY

HIGH

473

100

102

98

1924

MILT

STOCK

587

78

83

74

1925

JIMMY

JOHNSTON

476

96

107

85

1926

WILLIAM

MARRIOTT

377

94

91

97

1927

BOB

BARRETT

369

86

87

88

1928

HARVEY

HENDRICK

479

117

116

120

1929

WALLY

GILBERT

611

96

101

91

1930

WALLY

GILBERT

670

90

96

84

1931

WALLY

GILBERT

591

92

97

86

1932

JOE

STRIPP

570

109

108

110

1933

JOE

STRIPP

563

97

99

95

1934

JOE

STRIPP

406

104

107

102

1935

JOE

STRIPP

395

102

105

100

1936

JOE

STRIPP

461

104

106

103

1937

JOE

STRIPP

320

84

89

78

1938

COOKIE

LAVAGETTO

555

109

112

107

1939

COOKIE

LAVAGETTO

665

111

116

107

1940

COOKIE

LAVAGETTO

518

102

112

91

1941

COOKIE

LAVAGETTO

521

111

120

102

1942

ARKY

VAUGHAN

546

105

110

99

1943

ARKY

VAUGHAN

670

117

115

119

1944

FRENCHY

BORDAGARAY

537

104

102

106

1945

FRENCHY

BORDAGARAY

302

99

100

97

1946

COOKIE

LAVAGETTO

280

97

105

89

1947

SPIDER

JORGENSEN

499

105

107

105

1948

BILLY

COX

275

100

107

93

1949

BILLY

COX

420

88

88

90

1950

BILLY

COX

486

91

93

89

1951

BILLY

COX

492

103

103

105

1952

BILLY

COX

480

91

94

90

1953

BILLY

COX

364

107

109

107

1954

DON

HOAK

286

96

96

97

1955

JACKIE

ROBINSON

378

104

117

89

1956

RANDY

JACKSON

335

108

106

111

1957

PEEWEE

REESE

369

80

96

62

1958

DICK

GRAY

216

107

101

116

1959

JIM

GILLIAM

649

104

120

86

1960

JIM

GILLIAM

653

98

114

81

1961

JIM

GILLIAM

518

98

110

84

1962

DARYL

SPENCER

189

98

113

81

1963

KEN

McMULLEN

253

97

100

93

1964

JIM

GILLIAM

376

91

104

76

1965

JOHN

KENNEDY

113

72

82

61

1966

JOHN

KENNEDY

284

76

79

73

1967

JIM

LEFEBVRE

538

103

106

100

1968

BOB

BAILEY

360

103

105

102

1969

BILL

SUDAKIS

502

96

92

103

1970

BILLY

GRABARKEWITZ

624

119

123

115

1971

DICK

ALLEN

642

126

126

127

1972

STEVE

GARVEY

313

107

100

115

It really is a long parade to the graveyard. There
are guys who were once great but at the tail end of their careers
(like Lave Cross in 1900, Dick Allen in 1971), guys the Bums
wanted in their line-up but needed to squeeze them in at third
because they had prospects in their old position (Jimmy Johnston
in 1920-21, Jackie Robinson in 1955 and Pee Wee Reese in 1957),
versatile guys they kept on the roster would could be plugged in
at third when all else failed (Jim Gilliam), a guy who was a
great hitter, but couldn't play the more challenging position of
shortstop in their opinion (Arky Vaughan in 1942-43) and guys who
just couldn't field the position but hit enough to be moved to
another (like Steve Garvey, 1972).

There are some great nicknames on this list. Emil "Escape
Hatch" Batch, Frenchy, Cookie, Junior, Pee Wee, Spider,
Gink, Eggie, Doc, and The Dixie Thrush. And that's all, from an
organizational view, that was great. In the last seven years of
this stretch, it looks like they were aiming for offense, but
they plugged a different player in every year. No one could hold
onto the position. It was a bloodbath. In '23 - '29, it was the
same thing; seven players in seven years. In seven different
years during that run, there were so many different players who
played third, the guy who played it the most had 300 or fewer
plate appearances (I'm omitting 1946, a year distorted by
post-WWII business environment, and 1965, because while Kennedy
played in more games that year at third than Gilliam, Gilliam had
more at bats).

The Dodgers just combined a lack of intense concern with an
inability to come up with young players who were good enough to
make a career of the position. They threw half-axed ideas at the
position, repeating their pattern of futility generation after
generation with less forward motion than a Philip Glass musical
score.

The end of this run, btw, was the arrival of Ron
"Penguin" Cey, a clearly above-the-line offensive
player who was also a clearly above the line gloveman at third.
Cey lasted ten years there, a comfort to the front office, though
not one they seem to have taken to heart. Because when they they
traded the 34-year old Penguin for a couple of prospects in 1982, they immediately reverted to their old form. Look at this trail of
tears:

Year

First

LastName

Apps

RPRO

Roba

RSlg

1983

PEDRO

GUERRERO

656

127

116

141

1984

GERMAN

RIVERA

248

99

102

96

1985

DAVE

ANDERSON

256

87

98

75

1986

BILL

MADLOCK

409

105

105

106

1987

MICKEY

HATCHER

307

103

101

106

1988

JEFF

HAMILTON

319

92

88

97

1989

JEFF

HAMILTON

568

93

87

103

1990

MIKE

SHARPERSON

403

108

117

97

1991

LENNY

HARRIS

466

102

111

93

1992

DAVE

HANSEN

375

86

92

81

1993

DAVE

HANSEN

126

135

143

126

1994

TIM

WALLACH

460

113

107

121

1995

TIM

WALLACH

354

101

99

104

1996

MIKE

BLOWERS

354

100

104

96

1997

TODD

ZEILE

660

109

109

111

1983, a great-hitting butcher moved from the outfield. 1984, a
young failure. 1985, a utility man getting a chance, 1986, a
has-been singles hitter who couldn't field the position
particularly well when he was fresh. 1987, a utility man getting
a chance. 1988-90, toxic waste, and so on. Shifting what model
they threw at the position, but never getting traction.

In 1998, they changed away from their pattern again. They
brought in a 19-year old, Adrián
Beltré , and have stuck with him since. So far, he's been a
Jersey Joe Stripp...a couple of better than average years at the
plate, but mostly below, a couple of better than average years
with the glove, but mostly average. This year, he's doing
brilliantly so far, with 10 home runs and an OPS of 1.07 in the
31 games he's appeared in. It might be a Gink Hendrick 1928
season, a little shoot of hope peeking its head temporarily
above the miasma, or it might indicate a sea change in his
performance and Dodger third base accomplishment.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Back to the two Dodger Demand Side Staffing Challenges: the
conscious undervaluing of the position or its complexity,
resulting in desultory care, and the blind spot inability to
recognize quality in a specific position.

Most organizations, in and out of baseball, only need one of
these to fail. The Bums managed to combine them both, and over
multiple generations. Are there specific roles or jobs or
positions in your organization that never seem to get filled with
the right person, with the organization bouncing from mediocrity
to failure and back to mediocrity without even the luck to
stumble into the right person?

It happens all the time, and the bigger the organization, the
more likely it is that the habit of hiring the wrong person for a
specific job over and over will be welded into the organization
as part of it's way of being. For that habit, let's grant each
one of them the Gustave
"Gee-Gee" Getz Memorial Gratuitous Alliteration
Award.